The impact of Thomas Hobbes’s philosophical and political ideas on the English deists and freethinkers of the late seventeenth and eighteenth century has often been underestimated, or even ignored and denied, in scholarship on deism, although several early critics of the English deists accused them of Hobbism, among other things. Elad Carmel’s Anticlerical legacies has filled this significant gap in historiography, since it elucidates the nature and extent of the influence of Hobbes’s thought on the English deists. Although this book does not intend to provide an exhaustive analysis of the impact, responses and use of Hobbes’s ideas in eighteenth-century England, it sheds new light on the role that Hobbesian concepts and arguments played in the English deists’ theories, particularly in their war on priestcraft, which Carmel describes as ‘Hobbes’s war against the kingdom of darkness taken one step further’ (p. 7). Moreover, this book clarifies the roots and significance of the charge of Hobbism that Church of England divines, Nonconformist theologians and other critics levied against deist authors.

Carmel’s main argument is that ‘the relationship between Hobbes and the English deists was much closer than has ever been appreciated, or, in other words, that the deists were much more Hobbesian than is usually assumed’ (p. 5). While Carmel acknowledges the differences between the deists’ progressive ideals and Hobbes’s anthropological pessimism and political absolutism, the main focus of this book is on the deists’ anticlericalism and the impact of Hobbes on their opposition to priestcraft and institutional religion in general. In this regard, Carmel convincingly argues that the deists’ anticlericalism was not merely hatred of priests, but originated in their ‘comparative accounts of different religions, thorough analyses of competing histories of the church, erudite historical and philological studies of the scripture, and inquiries into the nature of matter and the soul’ (p. 7). Accordingly, the English deists formulated notions of natural and civil religion with the purpose of promoting civil peace and the advancement of rationality, in that they saw reason and true religion as one and the same thing. Carmel’s book points out that Hobbes’s hostility to ecclesiastical power informed anticlerical thinking in the decades following his death, when several English deists and freethinkers drew on Leviathan (1651) and other writings by Hobbes in a critical and selective way, so as to appropriate some of his concepts to their original philosophical and political theories. Thus, their engagement with Hobbes was thoughtful and complex, and the range of their borrowings from his works varied in accordance with the subjects they investigated and the arguments they intended to advance. When assessing the nature and extent of the English deists’ engagement with Hobbesian ideas, Carmel’s book focuses, first and foremost, on cases where textual evidence denotes direct engagement with Hobbes. However, this volume also takes into consideration deist authors’ references and allusions to Hobbes and his views in their published as well as private writings, such as manuscripts and letters. Furthermore, the book explores cases in which there are unacknowledged borrowings from Hobbes and striking similarities with Hobbesian ideas.

The book consists of an introduction, four chapters and a conclusion. The introduction details, in a clear and thorough way, the argument, objectives and structure of the book, besides considering, briefly, the state of the art on its subject. Chapter i discusses the early English deists’ views on reason, toleration and natural religion, focusing particularly on the period from 1670 to 1695. This chapter largely concentrates on Charles Blount’s work, given this author’s extensive debt to Hobbes’s anticlericalism and naturalistic approach to the history of religion. Moreover, this chapter examines the views of lesser-known and oft-neglected deist writers such as Martin Clifford, Albertus Warren and James Boevey, and it takes into consideration the objections made by various early critics of deism, from Charles Wolseley in the late 1660s and early 1670s to the Boyle Lecturer Richard Bentley in the early 1690s. Chapter ii, which is the densest in this volume, deals with the deist controversy in England between 1696 – the year of publication of John Toland’s Christianity not mysterious – and 1710. But, before discussing Toland’s early writings, this chapter provides an original and accurate analysis of the ‘anxieties about Hobbism and deism in the mid-1690s’ (p. 68), paying attention to the works of anti-deist writers such as William Nicholls, Humphrey Prideaux, Francis Gastrell, John Harris, William Stephens, Richard Willis and the famous philosopher John Locke, whose main polemical targets in The reasonableness of Christianity (1695) and its two vindications were antinomianism and, indeed, deism. The chapter then reassesses the early engagement of deists such as Toland, Tindal and Collins with Hobbes’s anticlericalism, biblical criticism, materialism, determinism and erastianism. The chapter also provides an excellent analysis of the way in which several critics of deism, particularly Samuel Clarke and other Boyle Lecturers, overplayed the connection between Hobbes and the deists. Chapter iii examines Shaftesbury’s, Collins’s and Toland’s borrowings from Hobbes in the period between 1711 and 1723 – a period when conservative critics were especially concerned with the spread of freethinking. This chapter also reconsiders the nature and purpose of two well-known Whig periodicals of the time, the Independent Whig (1720–1) and Cato’s Letters (1720–3), both produced by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, whose materialism and anticlericalism denote significant Hobbesian influences. Chapter iv covers the period 1724 to 1740, thereby paying particular attention to Collins’s and Tindal’s later works, including the famous ‘Bible of deism’, namely, Tindal’s Christianity as old as the creation (1730). This chapter also examines the works of later deists such as Thomas Chubb, Thomas Morgan and the Piedmontese aristocrat Alberto Radicati di Passerano, who wrote and published his Philosophical dissertation upon death in London in 1732. Although these authors had different worldviews, in that Collins and Radicati upheld determinism and materialism, while Tindal and Morgan described the ‘true’ Christian religion as a republication of the religion of nature, they were all interested in, and influenced by, Hobbes’s philosophical, historical and hermeneutical ideas and methods, to such an extent that various prominent critics, such as the Church of England clergymen Daniel Waterland and William Warburton, the renowned philosopher George Berkeley and the Irish theologian Philip Skelton, drew many parallels between these deists’ ideas and Hobbes’s materialism and anticlericalism. Finally, the conclusion to this volume calls attention to how the Hobbes-deism connection can also be noticed in the writings of American Enlighteners such as Benjamin Franklin, Elihu Palmer and, above all, Thomas Paine. In this regard, Carmel correctly observes that many American Enlightenment thinkers read the works of the English deists, but they interpreted the latter’s ideas through the filter of d’Holbach and other French philosophes. Moreover, the conclusion provides a concise but helpful analysis of the impact of Hobbism and deism on an English periodical published between 1841 and 1843, The Oracle of Reason, whose editors were even imprisoned on several occasions because of their freethinking attitude and anticlerical opinions.

Briefly, Elad Carmel’s well-researched and intelligently written book provides a fresh reassessment of the connection between Hobbes and the English deists of the late seventeenth and eighteenth century, concerning mainly, but not exclusively, their anticlericalism. Moreover, this book has several other merits, in that it provides an excellent account of English deism, its origins and development, its multifaceted nature and objectives, and its most important representatives’ metaphysical theories, political ideas and historical, philological and critical methods. This book can thus be used as an accurate, clear, concise introduction to English deism in its historical development from Blount to Morgan. Perhaps it would have been helpful to extend the chronological span of this volume, so as to also cover the views of Peter Annet, one of the most vocal deists of the eighteenth century. Another author that this volume could have considered is Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke – an anticlerical deist who, nevertheless, was a staunch Tory. Yet, this book is to be credited for reconsidering several ‘minor’ deists, besides the ‘usual suspects’ such as Blount, Toland, Tindal, Collins and Morgan, and for detailing the arguments employed by various anti-deist writers in a clear and thorough way. This volume is to be highly recommended not only to Hobbes specialists and students of deism, but also to all those interested in acquiring a better understanding of both the significance of Hobbes’s legacy and the complexity and originality of English deism.